I Forgive Me

I’m a real push over for Hallmark movies. I know they are a little sappy but I like the happy “awwwwe” endings. There was one line in the last one I saw that left an impression. The husband in the movie told the wife, “Maybe someday you’ll be able to forgive yourself.”  That caused me to meditate on forgiveness.

I say meditate like I know what that is. I think it just sounds a little more spiritual than saying; I’m thinking about it a lot, I’m studying it a lot in the topical Bible, and I’m talking to God about it a lot.

Anyway, we've learned since we were little (if we have brothers and sisters) that if someone says, “I’m sorry,” we say, “I forgive you.”  And we've (maybe just I have) had to occasionally work hard to actually forgive that person. As Christians, most of the time, we do forgive. We've been told to do that by Jesus. We forgive others as He forgave us.

But sometimes we just need to give ourselves permission to forgive ourselves. I mess up my life with sin. And you do too. We confess it to our Heavenly Father and He forgives it. Hebrews 8:12 says that when God forgives He never remembers it again. Forgiven and forgotten.

At times, though, we carry the guilt of our sin for a long time even after God has forgiven us. It’s not that we think we have sinned so great that God can’t forgive it. At least I hope we all realize that Jesus died for all sin in order that all sin could be forgiven. We accept that God has forgiven us. We just can’t get over the fact that we messed up so bad. And we can and often do keep a list in our minds of all of the times we failed as a Christ follower. We go back to the sin and revisit it and come away feeling just as guilty as when we first confessed it.

That is not the way our loving God wants us to live our life. That is not victory. That is not running the race well. Here is what I’m reminding myself this week:

1.    Don’t go back to the memory of the forgiven sin. God doesn't.

2.    Don’t wish you could change the past and decide what you should have done. It’s over. God has changed you.

3.    Don’t try to justify that old forgiven sin. It was sin. It was forgiven.

4.    Don’t worry that you will never get to where God wants you to be. He’s going to change your life to get you there. All you have to do is be a willing servant.

In my meditation I’m also rehearsing a choir song. These words in the song keep coming back in my thoughts, study, and prayer:

“All my shame, guilt, sins, forgiven

No more chains, fear, my past is over

I've been changed

I won’t go back

I can’t go back to the way it used to be”

God has forgiven me.

I forgive me.

 But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. 

Philippians 3:13-14